The citation presented to Dr. Yang, along with a framed photo of Bloomfield, reads as follows: "Linguistic Productivity: How Children Learn to Break the Rules of Language is a highly original, very readable book of wide interest to linguists of all subfields and theoretical frameworks. It uses computational efficiency to relate the number of exceptions a rule can tolerate to the number of regular tokens. The critical threshold decreases as the tokens affected increase, so a striking conclusion is that exceptions are learned best when the total vocabulary is small – an empirical answer to how children easily acquire with minimal input rules that stump adult learners. The book has potentially profound implications for historical linguistics and language change as well."

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